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Three Reasons You Hate Your Web Designer

Most small businesses already have a website. Fortunately for us, many of those small business owners also have stories of how they were let down by their web designer. The three most common complaints about web designers are: Our web guy builds nice …

Most small businesses already have a website. Fortunately for us, many of those small business owners also have stories of how they were let down by their web designer.

The three most common complaints about web designers are:

Our web guy builds nice websites but doesn’t understand our business.

They built a good website, then disappear when we need updates.

We aren’t getting new business from our website. It must be bad SEO.

We started Mediastead with these three complaints in the back of our minds and made a conscience effort to learn from the mistakes of others.

Understanding Your Business

Freelance web designers often can build great tech, but fail to take the time to truly understand your business and your customer base. Branding your business can be as important as functionality.

Other web designers excel at creating highly artistic multimedia websites, but struggle when it comes to making your website useful as a customer service tool or shopping experience.

At Mediastead we take a team approach that starts with your marketing plan. We identify your specific goals, and examine how your website should fit into the big picture of sales, marketing and PR.

Next we assemble the specialists, the team of geeks and artists that will work in tandem to make this vision of a web presence a reality.

Finally, we build a plan to put the website into action. With some businesses, that means hands-on training to get the most out of your staff resources. With other businesses, our team takes over the ongoing electronic marketing campaigns.

At Mediastead, we pride ourselves on building more than websites. At Mediastead, we build relationships.

The Disappearing Webmaster

Many freelancers will build you a $1500 website. Later, they tell you “Call anytime. Updates are only $75 per hour.”

In theory, this works. In reality, it doesn’t. If you build $1500 websites, you have to crank out two of them per month just to pay the rent. When you aren’t cranking out websites, you have to be selling like crazy to get two more clients for next month. Doing tiny updates for $75 per hour, usually billing 15 minutes at a time seems like wasted energy.

Conversely, giving your customers great service means that new projects get slowed down and marketing ceases.

The result is the same. Some freelancers simply ignore their past customers, while others just go out of business.

At Mediastead, we know there has to be balance. Good websites are constantly evolving. We strive to find customers that want to use their website and update it frequently. And we build our business model around providing support just as much as bringing in new customers and new projects.

New customers feed our growth, and our existing clients create a solid foundation for long term stability. We want to be the last web company your business ever hires.

Your SEO Isn’t Broken, Your Website Is.

“We have a really nice website. Unfortunately, the designer promised good SEO, but we haven’t gotten any new business.”

Search engine optimization (SEO) was the cool catch phrase of the past decade. Web designers made promises that SEO would deliver customers out of thin air. The truth is the SEO can bring more business, but only if your developer has a crystal clear understanding of your customers, and even then, good SEO is a long term process.

Additionally, good SEO focuses on the quality of customer as much, if not more, than the quantity of customers.

Good websites build relationships between your business and your customer. First, your business must have a good relationship with your web team.

At Mediastead, we treat SEO as an ongoing strategy. SEO is a journey, not a destination.

Mediastead – Marketing. Technology. Profit.

Our slogan “Marketing. Technology. Profit.” Speaks to our core philosophies. We begin with a solid plan based on your business’ marketing needs. We build the technology around the functionality you need and the resources you have. The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Every business large or small needs profits, growth, and productivity to survive in our rapidly evolving world. Mediastead would be proud to build a relationship with your company. Call us today at 215-253-3737 to get started.

“Over the course of launching two companies, Michael Rapino, has been instrumental in translating our brand and aspirations into an attractive and engaging web presence. He has been an invaluable extension of my branding team recently in strategic updates and maintenance to another website of mine as well ... I always joke, telling him that, “I’m his favorite client” (and that may be true) but he is without a doubt, my favorite person to collaborate with on anything web-related.“